My scenery is your scenery

This work My scenery is your scenery is created through my experience of living in the
Australian forest in Daylesford, far away from my native Tokyo.

I spotted a big tree, that fell on the ground. I cut trunk and brought the heavy wood to my studio leaving the trunk for a few hours.
When I came back, I saw a water puddle just below the trunk. I could see the leak from inside of the tree. I realised that it was the water that made the wood so heavy. This experience taught me
that the tree was living, and that a tree lives within the water cycle.

It has been 13 years since I arrived in Australia.

The impact that relocation can bring to people is often enormous. My individual journey to have come ‘here’ is only one element
within the global mass migration. I often reflect on this through nature, in particular the circulation of water – a cloud, rain, puddles and mist, as a reminder that we are on a process of
ongoing ‘becoming’.

In this artwork, the trunks symbolize human bodies as individuals, standing alone. They all share the scenery of our common possession
– the sky.

Enameled surfaces of the trunks...

Photo by Simon Strong

Becoming Locals

2016

Installation of Objects

Mild steel, Copper, Enamel, Sterling silver, Copper pipe

Photo by Simon Strong

Considering the affects of time, Naoko in her work Becoming Locals deliberates on the notion of ‘home’ and belonging, through
ideas of diasporic communities over successive generations. Naoko’s work was formed as a result of a research trip to Hawaii in order to engage with the Japanese diaspora, but equally reflects on
ideas of cosmopolitanism, the ideology that all of us essentially belong to a single community. Becoming Locals forms through ideas of re-location as a contemporary phenomenon, examining mobility
and cultural hybridism.

‘Multiculturalism is an older 20th Century term. In visiting Hawaii with its indigenous people, immigrants historically
from Asia and Portugal, and contemporaneously as part of the US, it seems clear that people in the Japanese diaspora aren’t concerned with the question of where they belong. Rather, I felt that
there is more of a sense of ‘un-belonging’, where people have chosen to become ‘local’’ .' (Inuzuka, 2016)

Text by Peter Westwood

Photo by Simon Strong & Ruby Atchinson

Nagare-tsuzukeru (It continues flowing)

2015

Interactive installation

(top left) Flood (Neckpiece)

(on the floor) 'Afterflood' (Brooches)

(right) Cumulus (brooches)

Mild steel wire, Copper, Enamel, Stainless steel wire, Copper pipe

Where is my place of belonging?

Where is 'home'?

Reflecting on this through the element of nature, and in particular the circulation of water (the falling of rain, the formation of puddles, the
genesis of mist and of clouds), we can be aware, or reminded of 'process of becoming'.

In my practice I am investigating clouds for their essence while examining the formless manifestation of water. From the perspective of considering
this subject matter in terms of its potential to provide visual allusions, I consider this to be akin to how I, or anyone, might be deemed a particle within time and in nature, reflecting on how
particles of personal experience accumulate to create 'the whole', a community, a home.

Photo by Tina Inserra & Naoko Inuzuka

Photo by Jeremy Dillon

Model: Fujii family

Photo by Naoko Inuzuka

Flood #2

2016

Installation of Wearable Objects

Mild steel wire, Copper, Enamel, copper tube

Photo by Simon Strong

Photo by Simon Strong

Nagareru (It flows)

2015

Installation

at a group exhibition Solstice

with Aurelia Yeomans and Inari Kiuru

(from left)

I'm saturated (Neckpiece)

I'm crying (Neckpiece)

I belong (Object)

I'm floating (Neckpiece)

Where have I gone? (Neckpiece)

Sterling silver, Mild steel

I'm interested in the element of a cloud: small particles creating a whole image that is ever-changing. As a migrant, I give a friendly glance to a
cloud travelling the massive Australian sky, as something reflecting my internal landscape. In a similar way, I see each individual person as an element in the natural and cultural flow that
create our constantly changing world.

I see a neckpiece as a sign revealing the wearer's status by its quiet but powerful visual presence. The idea is inspired by an image of a man
looking for his missing wife, just after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake in 2011, wearing a placard of her face. Nagareru (It flows), a series of neckpieces and an object, represent
signs that show the wearer's internal state. This series is for people in a flow and on the move: for migrants and for the millions of people affected by the phenomenon of global migration;
us.